Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Star Wars and Literary Causality

So, I will start by saying that, while this post jumps off from the new Star Wars trilogy, it's not primarily about expositing material from those films. It's about the issue of referentiality or allusions in literature and an interesting idea that came to me in thinking about all of Last Jedi's allusions to the first trilogy, particularly but not solely to Empire Strikes Back, and the question of what forms of referntiality are ok in literature and what forms become derivative in the bad sense or self-referential in the bad sense, since one of the criticism's voiced about Force Awakens is that star killer base as the new death star is a form of self referentiality within the franchise that ruins any literary credibility of the film. I don't agree with that reading of Force Awakens, but that is sort of beside the point for this post because what this post is really about is intersecting the general practice of literary allusion with the ancient Aristotelean doctrine of fourfold causality that gets taken up most famously by Thomas Aquinas in his classic "proofs" for the existence of God.

The first thing I will do just as sort of basic material is list a few of the obvious allusions in Last Jedi (SPOILER ALERT!). There are escapes from attacks on bases reminiscent of the escape from the Hoth base at the beginning of Empire. There is a young Jedi seeking and receiving training from an old hermit jedi in a remote location (and one where the X-wing is submerged, although it is not brought back out in Last Jedi). Luke fades at the end of Last Jedi in the same way that Yoda fades at the end of Empire. Luke fades looking on a sunset of two suns, alluding to that iconic shot in New Hope where we see him looking out on the two-sun sunset in the desert (just as Rey's trek on her speeder bike when we meet her in Force Awakens has a long panoramic shot from a distance just like the one of Luke in his land speeder when we are first meeting him in New Hope). Not only does Last Jedi end with an escape on the Falcon; that escape on the Falcon has (and this is one that I thought of only on this third viewing, which is why I go to see films multiple times  in the theater, so that I catch more of these that arise only in the gripping experience of watching the film) a wounded person being cared for in the sleeping birth on the Falcon: in Empire, it is Luke with his hand cut off, and in Last Jedi, it is Rose being cared for by Finn. Lastly, when Luke enters the rebel hold-out base in his avatar form in Last Jedi, the visual (mysterious cloaked figure entering an underground base silhouetted by sunlight behind) is framed like his entering Jabba's palace in Return of the Jedi.

So, those are all a bunch of nice little literary allusions that call up all our warm nostalgia for the first trilogy (and I mean that only in a positive sense: I love the first trilogy and I love how they have worked so many literary allusions to it into the new films; I think it gives these films a real unique texture). Now my second stage in this exposition is to give a primer in the classic/Aristotelian doctrine of fourfold "causality." I put it in quotes because it is hard to understand from a modern mindset, in which we have really lost the concepts of all but "efficient" causality as any type of "cause" (and that is another part of the fun of a post like this for me if any strangers happen to stumble across my blog and posts in random searches, to spread a little of what I have learned in my own studies and broaden awareness of these philosophical concepts that have been so lost in the modern world).

So, the four "causes" are the "formal," the "material," the "efficient," and the "final." When teaching this material when covering Aquinas's proofs for the existence of God in a freshman-level intro-to-theology course, I found the easiest way to convey what is meant by "cause" for a very unfamiliar audience was to say to replace the word "cause" with the word "explanation," and I liked to use the table  or desk at the front of the classroom as my example. The "formal" cause/explanation of a table is the basic form of "tableness": a solid horizontal surface supported by vertical legs (or even a single leg, if we're going to allow the form of "pedestal" to be part of tableness, but we also might say pedestal has to be separate, and we might even want to say that it has to be three or more legs to be properly a "table" because, with a two-legged thing, the legs have to function like pedestals and its more like a double pedestal rather than a "table" proper ... there are various possibilities, but the point is that we're defining what we mean by the "form" of "table"). The "material" cause/explanation is the material of which this particular table is made: wood, metal, stone, or a combination of any of those (or that horrible glue-and-sawdust composite "wood" of which everything you buy at Walmart or Target is made and that only ever lasts through one assembling ... if you have to disassemble it to move, best just to buy a new one when you get to the new place). The "efficient" cause/explanation is the one that we moderns are used to thinking of as "cause": the carpenter or other tradesperson who made it. Lastly, the "final" cause/explanation is also called the "teleological" cause and really means the purpose for which it was made: to put things on while using them (materials on which we are working, plates and utensils and food dishes for a meal, and so on).

Now to the basic, distinct idea of this post. As I said, this is actually a pretty simple post that is just doing a little bit of exploration of applying the ancient concepts of causality to what we think of more as "literary" exposition these days, particularly in element of literary "allusions." The basic idea, in terms of the ancient idea of fourfold causality, is that the instance alluded to (Yoda fading) is (only) the "formal" cause of the instance in the present film in which the allusion is actually being done (Luke fading). It's not efficient causality because Luke having entered Jabba's palace in Return of the Jedi does not in any way mechanically necessitate him entering the abandoned rebel base in a particular way in Last Jedi. Mechanical/efficient causality is fine, and it is actually essential: "mechanical efficient causality as applied to a story" would actually be a pretty good working definition of "plot." But a story--a text--also needs texture, and that is what allusions provide, and that is a role for "formal" causality.

If I had to say I am making any point here, it would be that, while relying only on allusions and allegory (which I define as carrying over the plot wholesale, meaning also completely carrying over the palette of characters) winds up being derivative in a clearly bad way (but I think the new Star Wars avoids being derivative precisely by having a new slate of character types, because a plot is really things like "person A does thing X to person B," and you can't really carry over the plot if "person A" is not the exact same character type in work 2 as in work 1, for instance, the final confrontation of the next film will not be derivative of Return of the Jedi because you no longer have the three-tiered hierarchy of Sith overlord - Sith lord - child/underling of Sith Lord because Kilo and Rey have shared experiences as more like equals and they are the only two in the final confrontation, they have had conversations with and impact on each other in a way that never happened between Luke and Vader or Palpatine), referntiality and literary allusion in itself is not bad because it is really just an instance of "formal" causality in action. And the flip side is that the ancient model of fourfold causality might still have some use in discussing things like literature and elements in literature that we still find meaningful to explore, like allusions (particularly as allusions, rather than as mechanical plot elements).

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